Ok, for this tutorial we will be making an animated Counter-Strike: Source spray, with ummmm, lets say 10 levels of transparency (100 available if you are ambitious!).
Step 1: Creating our animation in Flash...
Ok, load up Flash, we will build the transparencies first. It should start you with a default 550x400 document, resize our work area to 256x256 (follow the steps in the screenshot below).
Now lets make some basic shapes, Select the "Circle" tool from the tool bar on the left (), select "No Color" for the fill color, and any color for the line color (besides white, use something visible like red, blue, green, black, etc) (), and draw yourself a circle, a few ovals, maybe get crazy and throw in a few squares while your at it. Just make sure once you are done you have at least 10 fill spots, a fill spot is any place enclosed in lines, like so (I circled 3 of about 15 fill spots in red to show you what I mean):
Ok, now we will fill all our cute little fill spots with random colors, go ahead, go nuts with the fill tool and move on to step 4.
Ok, your masterpiece should look somewhat retarted, much like mine:
Now lets learn what Alpha is all about :) First, select the Arrow Tool () and then left click on one of the filled in fill spots, like so: Once you have a fill selected, look to the color mixer (Usually the top right
of the window) and adjust the "Alpha" slider to any value you wish, once you do so and then deselect the fill, you will notice it has become lighter (because its transparent, and now you can see the white background through it, not to worry, the white background wont be there when all is said and
done.) Now, repeat this step of the tutorial for each fill, use random values on
the Alpha slider, then move onto the next step.
Ok, now we should have a crappy looking mess, but hey its transparent! Your crappy looking mess should look nothing like my crappy mess, but should have similar transparencies: What we will do now is make a second frame, just so we can call this an animation, yes, I know, its a cheap cop out, but it is all we need as a learning step, so, go to the timeline/layer bar up top, and click on the second frame and hit F6 (this will create a "Key Frame") A key frame will allow us to edit the next frame, starting from where we left off in frame 1. Now, go ahead, mess shit up, make some changes for frame 2, hell, erase all of frame 2's contents if you want, who cares(Thats what I will be doing :P)! See the screenshot below for assistance in creating a key frame.
Ok, now we have an animation, go to the Control menu and hit "Test Movie", you should now be presented with the lamest animation you have ever seen in your entire life. Now we will export our leet frames to PNG format. Close the preview of your lame animation, and click the File menu, then "Export Movie...", in the "Save As Type" box, select "PNG Sequence" and type "spray" for the filename, all lower case. You should be presented with a settings window, make it EXACTLY like the one in the screenshot below, then click OK. (If resulting spray is to large in file size at the end of this tutorial, try it with 128x128 or 64x64) There, we have just exported 2 PNG images with transparency/alpha data intact. Close flash, and open Photoshop.
Ok, open the 2 PNG images in photoshop, in the first image, click the Select menu, then click "Load selection..." and you should be presented with this window: Make sure the settings are exactly like mine, and click OK. Now it should have automatically selected all the shapes you drew in flash. Now create a new channel by going to the Channels tab in that nifty box on the right side of the window, and then click the little arrow button and select "New Channel...", then make sure the settings match mine, and move on to the next step.
You should now have a black image with selected shapes, but no color, just solid black. Thats the way we want it, first thing you do is click the little check box next to "RGB" in the channels tab ()
then hit BACKSPACE, you should end up with something like this: Now go to File>Save As... and save it with the TGA (Targa) format, it will ask you for some settings, make them exactly like mine and then save it: Repeat these steps with the second PNG image.
Now our frames are ready for importing! If you already know how to combine TGA's into animated sprays, your done! Go do it! If not, You need to now move onto this tutorial by Killerfromsky, to learn how.
I hope this tutorial was helpful and informative! Happy Gaming!
FILE SIZE OF THE RESULTING VTF CANNOT BE LARGER THAN 131KB SIZE ON DISK (right click the VTF and properties to see exact size on disk)
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), select "No Color" for the fill color, and any color for the line color (besides white, use something visible like red, blue, green, black, etc) (
), and draw yourself a circle, a few ovals, maybe get crazy and throw in a few squares while your at it. Just make sure once you are done you have at least 10 fill spots, a fill spot is any place enclosed in lines, like so (I circled 3 of about 15 fill spots in red to show you what I mean): 
) and then left click on one of the filled in fill spots, like so:
) 
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